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87

THE SOUL'S INHERITANCE AND OTHER POEMS

89

THE SOUL'S INHERITANCE

Poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Cambridge, 1906

I

1

Magnificent presence of the living Truth—
We know not when thy swift, serene, strong flame
Shall violate our sanctuaries of sleep!
We know not when, from carnal lethargies
And trivial pastimes and derisive dreams
Of ineffectual felicities,
Irresolutions and timidities
And temperate ambitions, we shall wake
To find our safe exclusions overborne,
The pale of our defence invaded, all
Our precincts of secure retreat destroyed;
To feel the dark enchantments yield; to hear
Thy trumpets blowing in our citadels,
The shouting of thy liege-men on the hillsides,
And in our ears thy far and forward call;
To lift at last unconquerable eyes
Suddenly to the challenge of the sunrise,
And feel thereafter always by thy light
Delivered from the mean distrust of death,
The tyranny of time, the brief content
Of all achievement and prosperity
Less than perfection, and at last resolved
90

To illustrate in thought and word and deed,
In life and death, the utmost that we are!—
We know not when or where or in what wise
Thou shalt appear, imperishable Truth,
Spirit of Liberty!—but well we know
That life and death are only thine adventure.
And well we know the time of revelation
Is always now—eternity is now!
The place of miracles is always here—
Infinity is here! Then here and now,
And in thy name, O latent Truth within us,
In thought and word and deed, in life and death,
Let us report and celebrate the soul!

2

Let us report and celebrate the soul,
In thought and word and deed, in life and death!
Then may we feel, perchance, the God within us,
Whose worship waits and who has slept so long,
Revive at last, athletic and superb,
Stand forth from custom, creed and circumstance,
Reclaim his high, inherent liberties,
And stem the rush of the resistless hours,—
Till, for a spacious interval, we see
The veils of darkness and deception fall
And leave us, eager of our enterprise,
Transparent to our own reality,
Against the thrilled, tremendous heart of time! ...
91

Then shall it come to pass—as we report
The soul and celebrate the soul in life
And death—that hardly and mysteriously
The stubborn prison-walls of ignorance
Shall yield beneath our blind, insistent hands,
And, bruised with misadventures in the dark,
We shall achieve the soul's advance, and stand
Bathed in the light remedial, and behold
The broad, released, bright waters of the soul,
Sun-dazzled and resistless, rush away
Forever and forever to the sea! ...

3

O to report, to celebrate the soul!
O to proclaim ourselves and all we are,
In thought and word and deed, in life and death!
O to depart, avid of explorations,
Winged and resolved, curious, in time and space—
There to retrieve the soul's inheritance,
There to report and celebrate the soul!
O to confess at last who is the Lord!—
To find at last, beyond to-day, in all
The innumerable yesterdays of time,
The onward, latent, long millenniums,
A rumour of us and a recollection!—
To learn at last that always for the soul,
In the dark earth and the deep sea, throughout
Chill ethers and the pale star multitudes,
92

The path leads homeward and the place is home!—
To know at last that never and nowhere
The soul is stranger, never and nowhere
Without recognizance and habitation!—
To learn, to know, to realize utterly
That time and space are phases of the soul! ...
O let us perfectly report the soul
And celebrate the soul, until at last
No time, no space, no state is vacant of us!—
Until at last the sense revives within us
Of indissoluble identity
With sun and earth and beast, with man and God!—
Until at last, from granite, schist and shard,
From senseless jellies and brute envelopes,
We mark our stages of deliverance,
The age-long, upward levels of our flight,—
And feel the restless, resolute, firm soul,
Conscious and lord of life after so long,
Still by the insatiable impulse driven,
Transgress the forms and infidelities,
The calculations and economies,
That prove our insufficiency!—until
At last we share the ancient and divine
Companionship of peril and perfection
With all who once bore witness to the truth,
And were compounded of the celestial fire!—
Then shall we stand, central and self-assured,
To labour in the austere fraternity
93

Of Gods and Saviours, till our lives record,
As theirs,—our deaths, as theirs, declare the soul!
Then may we learn at last that here and now
The very light is parcelled in our vision,
Wherewith Father Prometheus disclosed
The kindled soul's transcendent regency;
That here and now, in free communion,
We break the bread of life and speak the word
Of life, as when the veiled respondents sang
Clear, at Eleusis, in the sacred gloom;
That here and now, no less for each of us,
That inward voice, cogent as revelation,
That trance of truth's sublime discovery,
Which in the soul of Socrates wrought out
Gold from the gross ore of humanity,
Still speak, still hold, still work their alchemy;
That here and now, and in the soul's advance,
And by the soul's perfection, we may feel
The thought of Buddha in our mortal brain,
The human heart of Jesus in our breast,
And in our will the strength of Herakles! ...

4

O to report, to celebrate the soul,
Equal at last and forward with the Captains,
On the long frontiers where the twilight dies!—
There with uplifted voices that shall sound,
Sound and resound amid the loud and long
94

Vociferations of the embattled souls,
There to report the soul—in the broad dusk
Of hesitation, in the immeasurable
Unknown—O there to celebrate the soul!
There to resume the retrospect, to find,
Up the bright courses of the stairs of thought,
The traces of our perilous ambition!
There to endure the prospect, and, at last,
In the proud might of the soul's will, to bear
The peril as of intense emergencies,
The storm and strength as of gigantic wings,
The glare as of deep-driven lightnings,—all
The multitudinous menace of the night!
Importunate and undissuadable,
There, for the sole sake of the endless voyage,
There to stand out over the utmost verge,
Where the mist drives and the night overwhelms! ...
There in our skies the stars of revelation;
There in our hearts the burning lamp of love;
There in our sense the rhythm and amplitude
And startled splendour of the seas of song;—
And there at last—our own infinity,
Our own eternity still unappeased!—
There, for ourselves, for freedom, truth, perfection,
There to report and celebrate the soul! ...
95

II

Strangely, inviolably aloof, alone,
Once shall it hardly come to pass that we,
As with his Cross, as up his Calvary,
Burdened and blind, ascend and share his throne
And perfectly, as with our lives, atone
For the heart's triumph, for the soul's victory!—
Yet may we seem thereafter, dead as he,
To lie within life's sepulchre of stone ...
But he is risen, the Lord is risen!—and thus,
Thus may he rise, the Lord may rise in us,
Who sleeps, who is not dead, who lives alway!
And all who come love-kindled to the tomb,
Shall find, as Mary found, an empty room,
And meet the Lord, alive and on his way! ...
96

III

“I am the Way, the Life, the Truth!” he said.—
Deep in the soul of every man alway
There is a voice that says, “I am the Way;
I am the Life, the Truth, the Living Bread!”
And whoso hearkens he is comforted:
Well he discerns the Paraclete is there,
The Soul of Truth, the Christ, the Comforter,
Who, tho' the mortal dies, is never dead.
He is within us all, whom we have sought:
The Way, the Life, the Truth, the Paraclete,
The soul, who ranges with resplendent feet,
Silent and swift, from peak to peak of thought;
He is the Lord for whom the task is wrought;
He is the Lover whom we haste to meet! ...
97

IV

“Ask what you will, it shall not be denied;
Knock, and the secret door shall stand ajar;
Seek, and however much the way is far,
Yet shall the Bridegroom find, who seeks the Bride!”—
He knows how much the truth is justified,
Who is not unambitious as we are;
He finds, beyond the star we seek, a star,
Beyond our dreams, a soul unsatisfied.
He knows, and That within us more than we
Shall learn, how much we leave the best undone;
How little there is end or rest or peace;
And how the Asker and the Alms are one;
How whoso knocks brings welcome and release;
And how the search is the discovery! ...
98

PILGRIMS

Poem delivered at the annual dinner of the New England Society, New York, December, 1906

I

1

Pilgrims!—The choir of their adventured days
Sounds to the living, inward ear, and tho'
Their eyes are quenched, their lips are dumb with dust,
Yet, in imperishable communion,
Clear thro' the soundless retrospect of time,
Well may our spirits now to theirs respond.
For we who, in their stead, bear up the fire,
Bear on the torch of life's inherent faith
And inconsiderate will, may well discern,
Illustrious in their lives, the Pilgrim Soul
Of Man on its eternal pilgrimage. ...
Yes, for their deeds bear witness! Yes, for they,
Lit by some spark of the Promethean fire,
Publish their own recognizance,—afford
Proof of the Lord's dominion in his house,—
And by the old, the indefectible signs
Show how they earned their stern and splendid name!
O hearts of perished men, how shall we learn
Your secret, save as all your acts record
What angers vexed you and what loves fulfilled?
99

And well we know of these most arduous men,
At least, that here, across the bitter sea,
They rashly ventured into peril and exile
Not for renown or power or merchandise,—
Not for the world's remembrance or reward!
Rather they went abroad with the new Gods
Of their deliverance, for in new, clear wise
Their hearts received the old, austere, divine,
Tremendous guidance of the Cloud and Flame
Which lead the spirit out of bondage, move
Thro' waste and sea to bring the Pilgrim home.
Theirs was no profitable enterprise
Of traffic or of conquering caravels;
Rather their ships were ventured as the soul
Of man goes forth on life's storm-shadowed sea,
To find that better place where dreams come true
Of God's fresh purpose in the heart, and where
Liberty prospers in the wilderness! ...

2

O let us now return in thought and love
To these rebellious men!—that here and now
Their stern remembrance in the House of Life
May rouse at last the Lord of Life from sleep:
Lest we grow tired and tame and temperate;
Lest we grow stable, settled and secure;
Lest we no longer hear the voice, discern
The light that made them Pilgrims; lest our minds
100

Scant the truth's welcome; lest our hearts forego
The labour and liberality of love;
Lest we forget that still the Pilgrimage
Fills the long prospect of the Pilgrim Soul!
We are the Pilgrims!—Shall we less deserve,
Than they deserved, that stern and splendid name?
Or, less than they, afford the rightful Heir
His incommensurable heritage?
Rather, as now the light of truth expands
In statelier vistas to the inward eye;—
Rather, as now, with more perfected faith
And more religious ecstasy, we learn
That life and destiny and death and time
And God and all the long captivities,
Creeds and enslavements of the mind of man,
Which tamed the heart and set, on every hand,
Brief bounds to life's insatiable hope,
Are but the myths and symbols of the spirit,
Garments outworn and mansions long outgrown;—
Therefore, as truth is merciless and just
And perfect as each one of us must be,
Inexorably and with deliberate feet
Let us of these and all dead dreams and things
Tread down the dust into the common way,
That man may liberally advance!—for thus
May we with haughtier strength and hardihood
Send forth the vagrant and victorious soul
From dreams and desolate insanities
101

And gross deceptions of the solid world,
Into the shining night, on to the Road! ...
Well may we know it lies before us still,
Who are the Pilgrims, as it stretched for them
Whose pilgrimage is done!—the self-same road,
Hazardous, hard, unknown, which leads afar,
Thro' lusts and lies, thro' laws and governments,
Thro' settled customs and established creeds,—
Thro' all substantial things and sensible forms.
And well for us if we may find it out,
And walk thereon our spiritual way
Forward to real achievements and progressions,—
Pilgrims, as once they were, in high resolve
Launched on the Pilgrimage that once was theirs! ...
102

II

They are gone. ... They have all left us, one by one:
Swiftly, with undissuadable strong tread,
Cuirassed in song, with wisdom helmeted,
They are gone before us, into the dark, alone ...
Upward their wings rush radiant to the sun;
Sea-ward the ships of their emprise are sped;
Onward their star-light of desire is shed;
Their trumpet-call is forward;—they are gone!
Let us take thought and go!—we know not why
Nor whence nor where—let us take wings and fly!
Let us take ship and sail, take heart and dare!
Let us deserve at last, as they have done,
To say of all men living and dead who share
The soul's supreme adventure,—We are gone! ...
103

III

Let us go hence!—however dark the way,
Let us at all adventure hasten hence!
Too well we know what secret excellence,
Real and unrealized, brooks no more delay
Of who would make love perfect, and display
In life the spirit's true magnificence ...
Haste!—lest we lose the clear, ambitious sense
Of what is ours to gain and to gainsay.
Let us go hence, lest dreadfully we die—
Die at the core of life where love is great,
Where thought is grave, audacious and serene ...
Thither and hence all vast achievements lie,
There where the truth's transcendent virtues wait
Up the dark distance, radiant tho' unseen! ...
104

IV

O great departures from the thrift and care
Of a less love, of a less truth than we
Can hardly, in the last extremity
Of all our powers, believe that we may share!—
Nobler prosperities, that wait us where
We go—if we have strength and will to be
Mariners of whatever wreck-strewn sea,
Waifs on whatever ways shall take us there!—
O great departures!—O prosperities!—
Ventures and consummations!—you are hence:
Hence from the safe denials and pieties
Which life is eased and ruined and pleasured of!—
For the strong heart conceives no bounds of love,
The soul no measure of magnificence! ...
105

LIFE IN LOVE

I

1

Clear and profound and dark as well-water,
Grave eyes transfused with gold, you were not blind;—
You were not numb, brave breathless heart of joys,
Proud heart of mercies and mysterious tears,—
You were not faithless, when the shrine lay bare
And there was splendour in the sanctuary,
As momently between us, from afar,
White thro' the mist, rose-hued as with the young
Life-blood of love's desire, soul signed to soul! ...
You were not blind, wild eyes whose glance disclosed
Love's power and purpose which no tongue can tell;
Loosed and abandoned heart, which, swift as fire,
Seized the soul's heritage, you were not numb,
When first we saw the spirit and the source
Of life's pure essence, like a light revealed
Within us, radiant and alone;—when first
We knew the whole and best of love remained,
Sphered in the new transcendency of life
Beyond us, like a still unravished bride;—
When first we felt, in one another's arms,—
Strange and extreme to us, almost as death,—
106

The tragic sense of solitude;—when first
We were with love together—yet alone!
Grave eyes, brave heart, in vain, it seemed in vain
We saw, we dared, we were not faithless then,
We were not weak.—Yea, love itself seemed vain
That one first day of wonder and no words!
For, hour by hour and all the new day long,
And hour by hour and all the thrilled night thro',
And while your hands clung and your lips assured,
And while my life-blood thundered on your breast,
We were alone—together, yet alone! ...

2

So was it shown to us as in a vision,
That day;—and once again, that sleepless night,
As in a trance we seemed to go afar
From love's inveterate violence of being,
From life's incessant uproar, and, alone,
Pause in the thrilled tranquillities of thought. ...
There, with the pulse still rhythmic in our hearts
Of love's wild music, and the flush still warm
About us, of the senses' leaping flame,
We heard the more ineffable song—as yet
Wordless and distant to the inward car—;
We saw the lordlier light—as yet pearl-hued
Thro' the fresh twilights which precede the dawn—;
We felt the loftier hope, the larger whole,
The lovelier rapture of that deeper sense
107

Of life, which of the spirit's utmost strength
Alone,—with vast completions and austere
Beginnings and perceptions clear and new,
Valid and delicate as truth must be—
Conceived in secret, is matured and born.
And then—and all at first—and in the new
Anguish of solitude—and from the far,
Still, spiritual mansion—ours at last!—,
The life we long had lived and shared appeared
Vague and fantastic thro' the friendless dark,—
As something somewhere for a little while
On the immense horizons, like a dream
On the remote and restless marge of sleep,—
Like the dull rumour and the distant flare,
To one who dwells by a deserted sea,
Of some tumultuous city on the verge. ...
Yes! ... we discerned, in the full, first, strange hour,
How much our lives had been a blinded sense
Of twilight, brief and brave and treacherous,—
A clashing sound of song and lamentation,—
A tragic spectacle of men and things
Innumerable and hurried and estranged,
And all phantasmal, and remote to us,
And insignificant,—like some confused
And shouted tidings, borne by false reports
And faithless messengers, to where the Lord
Still in dark chambers stayed and slept unknown. ...
Then, with a deeper meaning, beautiful
108

And tender, in our hearts revived once more
Love, and the free hilarities of all
The young earth-children in the rain-swept Spring,
And the tremendous tears that rise like rain
Blown from the dark, unplumbed, adventurous seas
Of spiritual solitude—to fall
Like a confession in the dust of death. ...
And then—and then—as wonderfully we
Received the secret, and our sight, at last,
Cleared with the vigil, and our hearts grew calm,—
Turning, we saw in one another's eyes,
Silent as star-light, silver-clear as song,
The light from peak to peak beacon afar
Thro' darkness ..., and our hearts kindled anew,
And love matured and strengthened to endure
The labour and achieve the heritage. ...

3

For then not yours alone and mine alone,—
Darling, we knew at last!—but ours and love's
Was the supreme and sacred best—the soul's
Perfect inheritance; and hand in hand,
Ambitiously, we took the high resolve:
Knowing no beauty of our lives was lost,
No passion scanted, no desire, no joy,
Withered or dispossessed, if all, at last,
Was with the one perfection kindled thro',—
If, for love's pleasure and communion,
109

Spirit and sense and heart and mind together,
Inseparable and single, all at once
Thrilled to the deeper sense of life, and proved
All valid, all victorious, all redeemed! ...
Then haste was in our hearts lest we should live
Leaving the best unshared—lest we should die
Dreadfully twain, before the task was done! ...
“Haste! There is haste,” we cried, “for time is now
And brief; and love's far prospect goes away
Down the free high-road of the perfect quest ...
And it may well be long! ...”—Yes! long indeed,
We thought—who knew how much the heart is frail,
How dark the venture and how far the goal—,
Well may it be, in truth it shall be long,
It shall be gradual and austere to bring
The wild wild love into the soul's dominion;
It shall be strange and splendid to prepare
The House of song and fire and festival,
His House at last, his lord-ship, for the Lord;
It shall be wholly arduous and divine
And feasible to lock the lips of Pan
With the tremendous silences of truth,
And task his strong lascivious limbs with toil:
To force true service from the ancient foe,
And lay strict burdens on the winged steed;
And it shall be a triumph and ecstasy
To drive love's lightnings up the sullen night,—
To fashion of the fire that lurks and leaps
110

And sings and kindles in the source of life
A lamp to guide us in the spirit's peril! ...
So, in life's haste and in love's jeopardy,
Were we resolved, however hard and long
It well might be, and we however weak,
To lay, with hands of longing and control,
The soul's strong harness on the mighty beast,
So he might labour for us—until at last
We, of his strength, were lifted and unbound ...

4

Soft, sombre hair—strange sweetness of my Love—
Clear, rose-pale, sensuous lips, and white, small breasts
Set spaciously asunder—, not in vain,
Not for the moment's rapture are you fair!
Deeper than life, and nobler far than joy,
In you previsioned, may the mind discern,
The heart receive interpretations—signs
Soon to reveal the secret—, as we stand,
Like exiles who return from very far,
Where the calm light lies warm along the threshold,
And the soul's silence in the shining house
Welcomes with love the glad wayfarer home! ...
Home—to the soul! My Darling—now, indeed,
More than the promise is fulfilled, we know! ...
For we have been, in many a night and day,
Perfect to one another; we have loved,
And felt the imperishable hours bring forth
111

Beauty, and delicate intensities
And amplitudes of being, and liberties,
And rapt persuasions of the living truth. ...
And we have lived and loved by noon and night,
Seeming transfigured ...; and the loveliness
Of earth and sea and sky has been to us
More spacious and sublimes—a more serene
And spiritual rapture! ... Yes!—and life
Is, in its sensuous strength, a sacred thing
To us; and all its large hilarities,
Flushed youth and sexual impulse in the blood,
The flowing and abundant natural heart's
Affections, and the mind's far gyres of thought,
Yield to the spirit and the finer sense
And understanding, patiently matured,
And stedfast longing and adventurous mind,
Treasures of theirs beyond our partial dreams ...
Home, to the soul! ... My Darling, still and still
The quest is ours—the quest, in sense and soul! ...
Still is the way before us, and the power
Within us, and the longing unassuaged,—
Darling!—and still between us life and love! ...
112

II

That day we saw the sunlight dawn and die,
The twilight close, the dusk grow deep and still,
The red moon rise, the white moon climb the hill,
And darkness fill the caverns of the sky...
That night we saw the storm-strewn beaches lie
Endless and pale, the midnight stare with stars,
The ocean flash like countless scimitars,—
And felt the feet of time go soundless by...
That day! That night!—We saw the harvest rise,
Of truth's immortal seed, and yield its grain,
Where thro' the soul's starved acres love had passed...
We were like mariners whose sleepless eyes
Have sought on each horizon's verge in vain
Their landfall—and who come to port at last! ...
113

III

That day love stood like sunrise at the goal;
The labyrinth of life seemed filled with light;
And, as we passed, a splendour calm and bright
Wreathed for the brows of death an aureole.
Swiftly, we saw dissolve from pole to pole
Wide gyres of indistinguishable night,
Till, grave with raptures of austere delight,
We stood in the vast day-break of the soul! ...
Then, as in memory's spectral afterglow,
Life seemed a rumour of far things, a tale
Told in a ghostly twilight, long ago ...
And Love, whose guidance we had shared so long,
Paused on the verge of death's inviolate pale
With lips of silence and with eyes of song ...
114

IV

That night of spiritual silences
We found love's inmost silence, where the days
Are silent, where the perishable phrase
Of song is silent, and where silence is
Like light along majestic distances
Opened before the soul's unswerving gaze ...
Where life is silent, and the blatant ways
Of life, and life's divine uncertainties ...
There we beheld the dark enigmas yield
In silence, and in silence truth appear,
Stainless as star-light on a silver shield ...
And still we felt, as in transcendent skies
Beyond the mind's last outpost, calm and clear,
Silence and glittering tranquillities. ...
115

LOVE IN LIFE

I

Beauty and Truth are like a stedfast shore
Bathed in tranquillities of boundless light;
Veiled in the stainless garments of the night,
Gemmed with the glory of eternal stars;
And there, enisled above the reach and roar
And windy wreck of Time's abysmal sea,
Life, like Odysseus worn with works and wars,
Love, like the Nymph Kalypso, half-divine,
Meet and commune, transfuse and intertwine,
Thro' mortal hours of immortality. ...
So has it been for us—as it shall be
Still and hereafter so! But now, once more,—
Now, while the powers of life and love are whole
And perfect to their inmost core,—
Now, one by one and all inexorably
The imperishable hours are spent,
The hours of new, renewed abandonment,
Of life's surrender, soul and sense,
Of love's possession, sense and soul;
And while our spirits yield and yearn,
And while the heart lies naked still
And still the fain, flushed senses thrill,
The swift and ceaseless tides return
116

To bear life's restless venture hence. ...
Now, therefore—now, Beloved—my Darling, now
While still the golden and transparent glow
Of the inextinguishable desire
Colours thy pale and perfumed loveliness,—
Now while love's assignation still is sweet
In the high, bridal mansions of the heart,—
Veiled and voluptuous and discreet,
With eyes still open to their depths of fire,
Still rash, still languid with love's long caress,
Once more, with me, Beloved, rise up, depart!—
Once more,
Pass from the shadowed door! ...
Winged with the Spirit; robed in light and song
Born of the purest ecstasies which throng
The unutterable heart transfused with love;
Let us return, transfigured from above,
As thro' love's lingering sunset's golden haze
To life's familiar, tried and transient ways. ...
Let us, as many a time before,
Together, while the great lights wane,
Traverse the sombre corridor,
And by the steep, dark, silent stair
Descend together from the secret room
Where, thinly, in the perfumed air,
Pale thro' the curtained window-pane,
The veiled light falls along the breathing bed. ...
117

While quietly overhead
Round the low, narrow cornice grows the gloom. ...
Let us return! This hour of life is dead:
Love and the Truth's eternities remain!
Hither and hence the ways of love are sane,
Splendid and sane and secret to the end!
Therefore with Love, as freely with a friend,
Hence from the heart's invincible regency,
From sanctuary,
From this clear Eden, this sequestered place,
The breathless, long desire, the brief embrace,
The eyes that lighten and the lips that burn,
Let us return! ...
Life sounds its thunder-call!—
Fearless, Beloved, as lovers let us go,
Radiant with love's resplendent after-glow,
Down from the garden and the festival;
Down from the pleasaunce and the shadowed wall;
Down from the vineyard by the shining shore;
Down to the storm-swept stream of life once more!
Come!—for our lives shall not be less,
Since Love goes with us side by side,
Borne forth on Time's tremendous tide,
Than in this Paradise of love's excess
And incommunicable happiness. ...
Therefore, receptive, ardent, bold,
Let us go down, go forth, and fare:
118

As, garmented in sunset-gold,
Winged with the midnight's moonless air,
Hazardous men go down in ships
To the inhospitable seas. ...
Swift and responsive on our lips,
Life's large hilarities resound;
Clear in our eyes and hearts abound
The light no loveless vision sees,
The joy no loveless heart can share;
And, in the rumouring street below,
Life's human currents rise and flow—
Whither or whence we neither know nor care!
Only our hearts rejoice as now we go—
Lovers, alone, together—down,
This first of nightfall, to the sleepless town,
The streaming thoroughfare! ...
O my Beloved, how sweet it is,
How dear and human, strange and sweet,
Free and afoot a night like this,
To wander forth; to feel again
The mighty murmur and multitude of men;
To see, in fire and smoke, the street,
Strident as Hell's remorseless gorge,
Furious with faces, disappear
Between the endless lamps alight,
Into the sunset flaming like a forge!—
While, interfused with the gold atmosphere,
Quietly falls, this end of afternoon,
119

The grey, great shadow of night,
Whereunder shines the round, red, murky moon,
Like a low lantern, watchful and withheld
Under the cloak of a conspirator ...
The street is like a flaring corridor
In some fantastic, harlot's house of song
And wine and women and wantonness and wrong! ...
And sweet it is to understand
The rash desire, the thrilled delight,
And by the restless charm compelled
To feel our eager lives impelled
With life's strong stream, and hand in hand
To wander in the lessening light. ...
O sweet it is, O wild and sweet,
To feel the young heart's vagrancies
Resume dominion!—while the night comes down,
Dressed in her smoke-begrimed, star-spangled gown,
Like a procuress, witching, old and wise:
The silent, sinister, discreet
Accomplice of the brawling, bawdy street,
Who shelters and secludes from sight
The dreams, desires and deeds that shrink from light—
Exquisite, rash, lascivious privacies;
The eyes of lust, the virgin's startled eyes;
The assassin's knife, the victim's broken breath;
The pain of poverty, disease and death;—
The heart's supreme, inviolate secrecies! ...
120

Yea, Love—how free, how intimate, how sweet,
How vagrant and voluptuous, arm in arm,
At dark to wander in the city street!—
As lovers whose desires fulfil
Of life and love the secret will,
To pass, to pause, to swiftly lean
In shadowed porticoes, to kiss
With wilful lips, abandoned, eager, warm;
With eyes unseeing and hands that clasp unseen;—
To share our secret, and because of this
Feel our two lives miraculously one,
Our hearts disclosed in rapt communion! ...
O Love, how sweet to fold our solitude
About us like a mantle, and pass on
Loved and companioned thro' the multitude! ...
How sweet to have no heed or care
Whither we go or whence we come,
Since truth is ours to do and dare,
And all the labyrinthine ways
Of human life are the soul's thoroughfare,
And all the spacious nights and flowing days
Are as pavilions where the heart goes home
To love—the perfect love we share!
The soul is here, the soul is there;
Hither or hence the heart is fain;
The truth is hard and high and sane
In every time and everywhere:
And we as lovers well may feel
121

The lustrous eyes of love reveal
The free, unutterable, just
And secret spiritual trust
That truth is possible, that we
Shall yet be perfect as we must!
Love dares not dream of less than this;
No less can life believe or be;
The smiles and frowns of Lachesis,
Who sits with fortune on her knee,
Are to the spirit vain and vile.
For always, when and where, we are,—
Here in the street where mile on mile,
In hope and fear, the captives press;
There in the sacred, secret room
Where life is love's and loveliness,—
The human soul's transcendent doom
Is ours alone to make or mar!
Ourselves are all, and all we know:
And therefore, strictly as the cost
Of life to us is high or low,
The game is won, the game is lost;
Since always by how much we give
Of life and love and thought and power and faith,
By so much and no less we love and live,
Find and possess the soul,
And, reassured of life, confront the goal,
Fearful of no betrayal after death. ...
122

Darling—the street is endless ... and the night
Eternal ... and the sacred, secret room
Is always furnished in the heart and fair!—
Love's bridal chamber is adorned, and there
The Paranymph, arrayed in golden light,
Waits for the Bridegroom in the quiet gloom. ...
Still in the bridal chamber—still alone,
The Bridegroom and the Paranymph—with love,
With life and love together:—even so
Let us begone!—and we are gone, and go
Into the street ... into the night ...
Where the stars rise and life's dark waters flow ...
Where, gyre on gyre and row on row,
Shine, inextinguishably bright,
The lamps that Truth, the eternal Lamplighter,
Kindles above
The brawling, bawdy street of life,
To guide the spiritual Wayfarer ...
Lovers we are! As lovers going home,—
Home to the heart with love's high secret rife;
Home to the spirit's thrilled eternity;—
Come, let us go! The best is ours to be!
Body and soul together, Darling, come! ...
123

II

I saw her shining garments cling
Around her like a moon-lit mist;
Her eyes were clear as amethyst;
Her hair was like a sea-bird's wing
Dark in the gold of evening;
And in the hushed room's narrow space
The light lay mild across her face:
She seemed as one about to sing. ...
She sang not—and without a stir
Time passed between us; and the light
Abounded, and the strength of love:
The light, the life, the strength whereof
The truth is nurtured ... while the night
Darkened and the stars lightened over her. ...
124

III

Her voice is pure and grave as song;
Her lips are flushed as sunset skies;
The power, the myth, the mysteries
Of life and death in silence throng
The secret of her silences;
Her face is sumptuous and strong,
And twilights far within prolong
The spacious glory of her eyes.
Her heart is like a place of power,
A pale of peace, a precinct of
Passion and all-consuming love ...
Her thought is like a lofty tower;
Her soul is like a Bride therein,
Whom only truth and love shall win.
125

IV

I saw her sandals of grave gold
Move on the marble, soft as light;
Her motion was like birds in flight;
The bountiful, the new, the old
Deep secret that no tongue has told
Was born of her—as is the white
First flame of day-break from the night,
As song-birds wake, as flowers unfold.
And then I kissed her sandals of
Grave gold, and kissed her hands and mouth;
And knew how more serene than song,
How spacious and how strong is Love!—
Spacious as thought is of the truth;
Strong as the conscious soul is strong! ...
126

UNISON

I

1

Thronged with the unpetitionable truth,
Which from the love-surrendered and one heart
Shone in the spirit's starred tranquillity,
Hued with deep light the soaring wings of song,
And thro' the labyrinthine flesh transfused,
Subtile as fire, the elemental blood,
We felt the indefectible prodigy
Of life respond to our prodigious lives,
While, with an eye new-opened to discern
Meaning and revelation, we beheld
The immemorial loveliness of earth! ...
The mountain rose in power beneath our feet,
Vestured in basalt and the endless grass;
Crested with forest swelled the distant hills,
Whence towering unalterable amid
Spacious serenities of sky and sun
Rose the ranged peaks of naked stone. ... Below,
Gold lightnings kindled on the leaping stream,
And over nurtured fields and pasturage
Coloured new harvests and perennial bloom,—
While over all, like benediction, lay
127

Calm azure of the immeasurable skies
And stintless gold of the down-pouring sun! ...
And we, in that exceeding hour, were not
Passionless or insensible! The voice
Of the united being of the world,
Life's unison and love's antiphonal,
Sang like an ocean to the inward ear;
Beneath earth's bridal garments, gemmed with light,
Enwreathed with flowers, and perfumed with the faint
Measureless motion of sun-sweetened airs,
The invariable beauty, like the clear
Transfiguration of a dream, appeared
To the dazed vision of the inward eye,—
While in the spirit and the sense we took
Our lover's will of the consenting bride! ...
Thus to our eager and initiate sense—
In love and the sole spirit's truth conjoined,—
Yielding her violated privacies,
Nature revealed her nuptial nakedness;
And we, against our human breast of love,
Held the one heart of life, and felt our hearts,
Filled with its mighty pulse, thunder to song! ...
So, in the mind's resolvent unity,
All powers and phases of the natural world
Showed the one urge within, and we discerned
In the rich tissue of apparent things
The secret sense which is not theirs but ours;—
So, of the sunlight and the mystic dust,
128

The flowering hills, the open face of heaven,
We phrased the full heart's wordless harmonies;—
And so, to us, in liberty and light,
Seemed the scarped summits of abiding stone
Like the pure pinnacles of thought that rise
In the clear aether of the mind's starred heaven! ...

2

O life's exceeding hour of strength and grace,
Of gentleness and passion, when, like gods,
We walked in native virtue, and, at ease,
Fashioned in beauty our apparent lives!—
When, interfused, the heart's persuasive trust,
In spirit and the enraptured sense contrived
Of our two beings one communion,
And life's ephemeral metamorphoses
Yielded their secret and were one and ours! ...
Then was it well with us!—and so, in truth,
So is it always with us, if we knew!—
So are we always kinsmen of the sod
And leagued with skies and mountains! Truth is one
In the wide purpose of the spirit's life;
And love's fount flows forever! ... And so it is
That when at last the liberated heart,
With love or the rapt spirit's strength fulfilled,
Gives what so long its senseless thrift withheld,
We feel the mind's immortal pregnancies
Come perfectly to birth, and haply see,
129

Clear in the freshening light, the pure gold's gleam
Shine in the spirit's inmost treasuries! ...
And so are we delivered! ... So it is,
As by the wind of loosed, uplifted wings
Or the strong, tender touch of a loved hand,
On secret chambers of the heart and mind
Some unsuspected door is set ajar,
And all at once we feel the thrill and tone
Of a great music, and the lyric cry
Of phrased, puissant voices, sweet with song,
Where, in life's holiest sanctuary, unknown,
Unsought, inviolable, Olympian,
The grave Gods feast together, and take no wrong
Of the frail, feeble things we are and do!
And thus—Yea, thus indeed—thus perfectly—
We are advised how dull we are and blind;
How with contracted powers our lives are waste;
How we are bound like slaves, like victims scourged;
And how in shame, damnation and defeat
The brief times of our being are passed away,
Which well might be, in each momentous hour,
Valid with victory and phrased in song,
Fragrant with love, and with the natural truth
Of the pure spirit freed and sanctified—
As one exceeding hour was once to us:—
To us who were, from love-surrendered hearts,
Thronged with the unpetitionable truth! ...
130

II

Breathless and unforeseen, it comes!—the hour
When, on the breast of the Beloved, we feel
Almost the secret sense of life reveal
Its meaning, and the source of life its power;—
When, as in some vast sunrise, like a flower,
Our soul stands open and our eyes unseal,
While all that fear and ignorance conceal
Seems in perfection life's predestined dower.
Then, as it were against the inward ear,
We hold in silence, like a chambered shell,
The dazed one human heart ... and seem to hear
Forever and forever rise and swell
And fail and fall on Death's eventual shore,
Tragic and vast, life's inarticulate roar! ...
131

III

Love gave us sanctuary!—and sense and speech
Of what we were at last, at most, at best;
Love gave us strength and faith to manifest
The soul's majestic virtues each to each.
We learned from love, what love alone can teach,
How love is dying in hearts that long for rest;
Love showed us how man's life is lordliest;
Love put the stars of thought within our reach ...
Love gave us guidance, and our right of way
Into his Paradise: and there, alone,
We were with love together day by day;
Till we, in silence, breathless at the goal,
Free of each other, burned and blent to one,
Shared the last loneliest secret of the soul. ...
132

IV

Earth, sea and sky are not as once they were
To us: there is no aspect of all things,
No pulse of heart or brain, no whisperings
Of truth's grave music to the inward ear,
Unaltered or unglorified: the mere
Being of life, intense as song-swept strings,
Is like a breathless sense of soaring wings
Loosed in the spirit's boundless atmosphere! ...
We are not as we were! Our feet have ranged
The summits of imperishable hours;
Life is a lordlier hope; and we, estranged
In secret and at heart from all control,
Walk in the wide new futures of the soul,
Charged as with incommensurable powers! ...
133

STRENGTH AND SOLITUDE

I

1

Sun, moon and stars—inviolate firmament—
Phases of earth's inveterate alchemy
Of life and death—profound tranquillities,
Thunders and trepidations of the sea—
How often have you been to man in spirit
A liberation and an ecstasy!
How often has the soul gone forth with you,
As, with the tide, a stranded caravel
Issues by noble estuaries, impelled
By streaming winds and led by the low sun,
Into the light, into the infinite spaces! ...
How often has the majesty and silence
Of starlight, or the clear crying of birds
At dawn, or the vast violet skies of evening,
Befriended us with spacious influences,
Composed the mind in quiet exaltation,
And, thro' the shining fabric of the soul's
Inconstant vision of eternal things,
Strained and refined the clouded wine of life!
How often has the sound and spectacle
And splendour of the universal being
134

Affected and admonished us to know
In all the common ways and days of life
The immanence of spiritual rapture;
And given us liberty at last to learn
What correspondence and complicities
Involve the soul with sun and moon and stars,
With sky and earth and sea and countless forms,
Passions and appetites and dissolutions,
Powers and faiths and pregnancies of life!

2

We have laid down our ear to the dumb sod—
We who are man and mortal as all things,
And more and yet not otherwise than they—
We have laid down our ear and heard the earth
Of graves and the innumerable grass
Whisper to us ... and we have heard the sea,
Delicate and enormous, shout aloud
And murmur in the midnight and the moonrise
Vastly and with a tired and tragic voice. ...
And we have heard the sunrise singing like
A lyre of gold, and clear and faint and far,
Star-choirs in the cosmic atmospheres! ...
And, hearing, we have caught out of the one
Immeasurable voice from every hand
Our own soul's secret,—we have felt, when all
Our whole life's strength seemed one, and all our heart
Was of one ecstasy, within ourselves
135

These diverse voices blent into one tone
Of the one Truth, one phrase of the one Song
Everywhere singing for our audience! ...
Yea, and of all this music of all things,
Surely we too, hearing, and very fain
Of the full import, which is ours, may yet
At last, at least—if nothing more—discern
How much and ever and all in all the soul
Is everywhere for everyone of us
Immediate and importunate!—how much,
In the pure purpose of the heart, the proud
Desire of the indomitable mind,—
Tho' the shrill chatter of our wasting lives
Leaves us at last weak love and spent resolve—
The truth is arduous and discoverable!—
And O how much on every hand, how much,
When the rare hour of sight and insight comes,—
Tho' it reveal to us how we are not
At best empowered and daring for great deeds,—
The broadcast very light of liberation
Flares in the narrow vistas of our vision,
Shines in the windows of our prison-house,
Flushed and persuasive and unquenchable! ...
O let us hear and see and feel and know
That nature, which is ours, that even we,
We too, whose lives have left their utmost strength
Unused,—we too, who have not truly known
Nor arduously doubted, but instead
136

Basely believed what seemed and was not true,
May yet, at last, for the soul's sake, discern
How all the meaning and the mystery
Go hand in hand and commonly along
The thronged and trampled avenues of life
And death,—how always and how much,
Whether in nature's elemental being,
Whether in labours of the lonely mind,
Whether in love fulfilled, or life's gross toil
And long-deferred perfection, by the soul
We are invaded and possessed and graced!
O let us, to the body and blood of life,
And to the heart and soul of what we are,
So animate and kindle that at last,
Welcomed, restored, reminded to ourselves,
We too may seem to pass beyond the veil,
Threadbare with light,—beyond the place of passions,
And, on the threshold of the Sanctuary,
Hear the last questions answered in the silence! ...

3

Yet, in that very moment when we dream
Of the soul's inmost self as one fulfilled,
Full well we know the end is not,—nor is there
Ever an end more absolute than now!
There is a strength and solitude within us
That will not let us rest! ... and well we know
137

That freshly and forever they shall return,
The unanswered question and the pregnant doubt;
And we, have we the passion and the power,
We shall emerge from where we entered in,
Deeming the goal was near, and pass beyond—
There to discern perfections unachieved,
There to reanimate to truths unknown
And liberties we dare not specify! ...
Had we the strength!—Have we perhaps the strength,
Who have all else beside? Are we not men?
Is not the Universe our dwelling-place?
And therefore perfectly in truth for us
Is not the utmost wholly possible? ...
O, with the baffled and the resolute
Vanguard of liberal humanity,—
O to so purge our lives of the mild hours,
Our hearts of humble longings and meek hopes,
Our minds of customs and credulities,
That we may find the days wholly fulfilled
And lightened of the Spirit—all the days
And all things and ourselves, rich and revealed
In the majestic meanings and the might
And passion and pure purpose of the soul! ...
O to be with Them—with their lives who lived
In truth, and with their hearts which knew no ease,
And with their souls which could not be denied! ...
O to be with Them!—Let us be with Them!
Yea, we are more sufficient than we seem,
138

We who stand out in the forefront of time,
Last of the living generations, set
With sleepless eyes on the last verge of thought. ...
For we alone, bravely and all in all,
We have usurped God's ancient heritage:
And where He died we hear a single voice
Of one who wakes into the world's dominion—
Our own voice singing where His choirs are mute:
A voice of challenge and of celebration;
A voice of love, puissant and serene;
A voice that rings up the long road, and breaks,
Where the Night closes like a dead man's lips,
The inert, dark, dreadful taciturnities. ...
A voice which the sad silence of spent things
Out of the Past,—which all the harsh and high
Clamour of life's huge process in the world,
Threatens, it may be, but shall not subdue
In anyone of all the least of us,
If we but rouse in our whole living strength,
As Jesus, once, and Socrates, to dare
And live and doubt and die for the sole Truth! ...
139

II

Thought's holy place is like a sepulchre;
The wine of love's communion cup is spilled;
The House of Life is like a tavern filled
With harlots, slaves and strangers, and the stir
Of dancing feet before the flute-player,
Of shallow voices shrill and counterfeit:
And there the smoky lamps of lust are lit,
And faith is frail, and truth is sinister ...
Yet, in the sacred chambers of the mind,
He lies as in his grave who is the Lord ...
No rumours vex him, and his eyes are blind
As death, and he is dead—like Lazarus!
What Christ shall resurrect him with a word? ...
What Saviour bring him back to being thus? ...
140

III

We, who are spent with weakness, wrath and lust;
We, who endure such vile captivities;
We, who descend by desolate degrees
The steep dark way, till dust returns to dust;—
We, who are pure, exalted and august;
We, who are Jesus, who are Socrates,
Who are compact of sacred mysteries,
Who are the very soul, loving and just:—
Sheltered in life's deserted House, we seem
Abject and senseless, like poor beasts who lair
In some vast palace where death's darkness creeps
Silently down to where we crouch, from where,
Perfect and solitary and supreme,
Heedless and motionless, the Master sleeps. ...
141

IV

Truly there is no law but truth; there is
No judge but justice. They who use the sword
Shall perish by the sword, for no reward
Is there but virtue, nor shall evil miss
The strict revenge of its calamities,
Since in and of ourselves, perforce, are scored
Exact effects for every deed and word,—
Nor life, nor death forego the least of this!
Nothing effects our destinies save we:
Ours is the seed we sow, the fruit we reap—
Yea, and the heart's one flame of ecstasy,
And the soul's vigil we are sworn to keep,
And life's low average of strife and sleep,
And, O, the best we are and dare not be! ...
142

THE NOCTAMBULIST

I

That night of tempest and tremendous gloom,
Across the table, for (it seemed to us)
An age of silence, in the dim-lit room,
Tenantless of all humans save ourselves,
Yet seeming haunted, as old taverns are,
With the spent mirth of unremembered men,—
He mused at us. ... And then, “I know! ...” he said,
“I know! ... O Youth! ... I too have seen the world
At sunrise, candid as the candid dew;
And felt, responsive to the cosmic life,
My senses kindle and my veins abound,—
My life leap forward like an eager flame!
I know! ... It all returns to thrill me thro'
To-night:—how much upon the virgin mind
Often the truth lies lettered plain and large,
When, on the face of things, the flushed new sense
Finds revelations which our faith receives,
Till the whole meaning, from the spectacle
Of earth and sea and sky,—our hearts attuned,—
Smiles out under the sun! I know to-night—
Catching your eyes beyond the candle-flame—
143

With joy, and not without a kind of sad
Compassion, and the weariness of one
Who has been all the rounds of repetition,
How much you take it all for granted! Yes! ...
And that's perhaps prosperity, as you
Esteem it—chiming in your singing tones
With the world's coarse appraisal. Now, at least,
You feel man's life sufficient, and your strength
Surpassing the whole task! You look abroad,
And see the new adventure wait for you,
Splendid with wars and victories;—for you
Trust the masqued face of Destiny. But I—
I've turned the Cosmos inside out!” he said;
And on his lips the shadow of a smile
Looked hardly human: “... Inside out!” he said.
And we said nothing; we discerned a vague,
Certain and incommunicable sense
That we, in his inscrutable regard,
Were but as phases of some general dark,
In which his life was spent, staring for stars. ...
Then we remembered how it sometimes chanced
That he would sit and talk, over his wine,
Of his adventures; so we held our peace,
And saw the candle-flame burn up before
His solitary eyes, and could not smile
At recollection of his trivial phrase,
As still he smiled,—till, “I have been,” he said,
“Since I was young like you—as once I was!—
144

Round and about this little, day-lit world,
And drained its springs of wisdom!—And to you,
Who'll not believe me,—since no man is spared
His journey round the world, and from the Springs
No drop can pass to quench another's thirst,—
I'll tell the ancient, ill-considered truth:
Wisdom's a shallow source, and all the world
Is near and small! Yes! the one soul within
Contains them all and yearns unsatisfied! ...
Yet, I believe, you realize, at the least,
That ignorance can only be the bliss
Of fools, and fools—Well, you are not so tame!
You'll make the journey,—for at last by these
Peripatetics one may chance to learn
What knowledge is,—and then—and then—at last
Bounding the Lord's domain on every hand,—
As here the unconquered darkness circumscribes
Our candle's humble regency of light,—
There are the Frontiers!” In his eyes there shone
Perilous ecstasies. ... He paused; and we
Saw the mild radiance slumber in his wine,
Sweet as stored sun-light from the vine-clad hills,
And felt our hearts beat high, as tho' we shared
His solitude, and in the ambient dark
Stared with his star-lit vision. ... “Yes,” he said,
“There are the frontiers,—far for you, and near
About me hour by hour; and all between
Is the old, same adventure of the mind,
145

Seeking, with no suspicion how the end
Will cheat its longing and deride its hope,
Ever its long-accumulating spoil,
Its hard-won, hazardous inheritance.
Yes!—I have stood in the beginning, where
You stand; and gone the journey you shall go;
Wrought the same tasks, and battled with the Gods—
As all we must!—and loved, as all we may,
With the old, pagan ecstasy! My sense
Was not less foolish nor less keen than yours
Of freedom measured as my will should choose:
So, in my scorn and strength and pride, I chose—
Heedless of all save just the mind's conceived
Perfection, and the heart's imagined best—
Life's lordliest liberties:—chose Love—chose Truth—
Chose to respond in all my works and days
To powers transcendent, which I knew not of! ...
So, witless, wilful, wonder-struck with life,
I captained all my voyage with ambition
Nothing could satiate—as the failure proves!
Yes, I was young, I grant you!—Ah, but what
If now, despite all wisdom and the years,
Youth's first resolve, in life and spirit still
Held stedfast unto death? I ask you, then
Might not the heart within me, greatly glad,—
Almost with pride, as one who sees the gold
Of day-break glinting in his sunset skies,—
146

Revive its by-gones? Yes! I feel anew—
The young heart's blood afire in every vein—
What love was once (who know what love can be
To the whole man matured!), when I—I too,
Flame-fed with passion in the moonless night,
Watched to descry one casement thrust aside,
To hear one voice make music of my name;
Or felt the silken whisper of one robe,
The beating of one heart, one eager tread
Come to my assignation in the dusk! ...
Yes! ... and I feel anew the splendid zest
Of youth's brave service in truth's ancient cause,—
When, with the self-same thunders that you use,
Edged with a wit—at no time Greek!—I too
Most pleasurably assailed and tumbled down,
With a fine sense of conquest and release,
The poor, one, old, enfeebled, cheerless God
Left to us of our much be-Deitied
And more be-Devilled past! And much beside
I well recall; and if I smile, it is
The smile we give to children—not in scorn!
Rather be sure I know there are those things
We do in youth, and may not choose but do:
Old battles fought again, old voyages
Renewed, and old discoveries re-made,
And much brave marching in well-trodden ways,—
All with a freshness beautifully ours!
Youth has its spacious leisures, when the brave,
147

Superfluous, necessary things are done;
When worlds are conquered; when the old vain Gods
Must fall again; when in the very face
Of multitudes we revolutionize!
And all's well done, I doubt not;—tho' the times
Of life may well seem all too brief to waste!
But this comes later, when—we learn!—as learn
We must, if we go forward still from strength
To strength incessantly,—to wage no more
With phantoms of the past fortunate wars;
To die no longer on the barricades
For the true faith; to spend no more the rich
And insufficient days and powers of life
Striving to shape the world and force the facts,
Tame the strong heart and stultify the soul,
To fit some creed, some purpose, some design
Ingeniously contrived to spare the weak,
Protect the timid and delude the fools,—
Who feel no deep, inspired response to life's
Whole power and peril;—and to beautify
By nice discrimination,—to explain
By phrase and fraud and fancy,—to reform
By dint of gross damnations and a most
Robust stupidity! The time must come
When we can deal in partialities
No more, if truth shall prosper: for we stand
Awfully face to face with just the whole
Secret—our unrestricted Universe,
148

Spirit and sense! ... And then, abruptly then,
Swift as a passion, brutal as a blow,
The Dark shuts down! ... and, desolate amid
Fair ruined dreams and strangled ecstasies
And lights we saw as stars, suddenly quenched,
We stand upon the Frontiers, and confront
The illimitable Night! ... And, O, the truth
Is terrible within us!—for at last
We touch our bounds—we fill, in every gyre,
In all its pearly mansions, wondrously,
Up from what blind beginnings, long-evolved—
The unfinished shell of our humanity;
And feel the sunless, soulless, shoreless sea
Immeasurably about us ... and we know—
Walled round and prisoned in the senseless dark—
How little we are free! ...” He smiled no more.
His lean hands closed together, and the light
Waned in the silence like a dying song. ...
Our minds seemed sleepless as a star, our hearts
Yearned to his meaning, and our eyes discerned
The plain lights lessen and his face grow far. ...
Then, as it seemed out of the dark, he said—
“The Night is best!—for only when we fill
The total measure of our human ken,
And feel in every exercise of being
The bondage of our fixed infirmities,
Are we assured that we, in every cell
And nerve, respond to all life's whole appeal,
149

Known and unknown, in sense and heart and brain;
And, utterly at last in unison,—
Beast, man and God, their several strengths as one,—
Meet the whole issue as a true whole man!
Only the Night is best—the Night wherein
Our eyes, long-used and wearied with the gross
World's inconsiderable spectacle,
Grow spacious, and, no longer blind with sun,
See, in the incommensurable dark,
Sudden as song, above, beyond us—stars! ...”
He paused; and then, across the table's space,
Gazed, as it were to fix us, each in turn;
And, with a smile that failed to cheer us, said—
“I'm a Noctambulist!—for in the Dark
Journeys are endless; and the virtue is
Of life's pure essence, which we term the soul,
To find small profit in appointed ends,
And weary of a measurable world.
My feet have tried all paths that man has trod,
And all lead out thro' twilights, and beyond,
Where man has never trod—and where I go! ...
And life and love and death and thought and truth
Seem strange and new to me,—who yet have been
Round and about this little, day-lit world,
And drained its springs of wisdom,—as to you
They do not seem, in youth's fresh hour of faith!
For the reality is all my care!
Little I heed, in splendour or dismay,
150

How men perambulate their common streets,
Drifted and driven, caused and causeless things;
Or drench the highways of their huddled march—
Forced by essential powers they only serve—
With sweat and blood and tears. They go their rounds,
Caged and constricted, forced and overborne,
And all unconscious of their servitude
And dark confinements,—helpless, pitiable
And insignificant; yet all their boast
Is freedom, and their faith is liberty.
But he alone is free—at least in some
Measure he may be free!—who takes the Dark's
Uncharted venture with a homeless eye! ...”
In the strict silence while he spoke no more
We heard the tumult of our hearts, and feared
Almost as men fear death, and knew not why
We feared ... until at last, while at the closed
Windows the wind cried like a frenzied soul,
He said, “I too have tried, of mortal life,
The daily brief excursions! Now I watch
You turn and turn in the same beaten track
Of brief desires and strict necessities,
While from the thronged vast circus round about
Stare down upon you all the eyes of the world
Which crowns the victor and the vanquished scorns
And thus, or well or ill, you run your race,
Going no-whither tho' the prize be won ...
I know!—I ran once!—and at last o'er-ran
151

My shadow!—Yes!—and so, abruptly paused,
Torn with tremendous laughter and wild tears,
Feeling truth's silent and relentless scorn,
Flame-edged, of all I was and all my deeds;
And set upon by the derisive shout
And fear and anger of the world, I broke
The circus walls, and hastily passed on,
And found the Darkness everywhere, and saw,
Thereafter, certain stars! ... And now, at least,
I go no more the dull, determined rounds,
Like a tame squirrel whirling in its cage!
I'm a Noctambulist: and in the Night
The star-traced, trackless ways return no more. ...
Thus have I learned that only in the dark
The freedom and the kingdom of the spirit
Are ours to seek; and I have felt the one
Utterly loosed and loving woman's heart,
There where the twilights failed and night came on,
Thrill to life's inmost secret on my breast ...
And I have known the whole of life and been
The whole of man! The Night is best!—for here,
Here where the world throngs and the day-light falls,
Here show the Marches and no Stars are seen! ...”
He rose, and we, who watched his face, discerned
The passion! ... Swiftly he resumed his cloak—
And he was gone! ... and thro' the open door
Bellowed the tempest, and the star-less dark
Over our one, quenched candle reigned supreme! ...
152

II

We heard his footfall on the vacant stair
The whole night long. We lay awake in bed
And heard him climb;—but those who slept instead
Smiled and assured us that he was not there.
We had our own important things to care
About—place, profit and the daily bread;
And then the street so thundered in one's head ...
And often life 's a commonplace affair!
Yet then we heard him!—we not they were right:
We heard him—Yes! tho' now we sleep by night
Almost as soundly as we sleep by day,
We waked, we heard him, heard—and nothing more. ...
For we, inert as they who heard not, lay
Damned and dishonoured as he passed our door!
153

III

Recreants un-armoured for a hopeless war,
We made with life the needful compromise:
Yet, tho' we were not great or good or wise,
We knew that he was not as all men are! ...
The meaning of the things he said was far
To us, and in the darkness of his skies,
Save as the light was mirrored in his eyes,
I think we never saw a single star ...
Yet, in the vexed and vital years of youth,
At night, alone, with all our bargains made,
We found his smile intolerable as truth;
For we, sered soul-deep by that scorn of his,
Felt in ourselves his ancient, undismayed,
Inexorable incredulities! ...
154

IV

“Only the Dark! ... Only the Mystery! ...”
He said. “Only beyond, above, before! ...
Only—O Captives of the wave-walled shore!—
Only the incommensurable sea! ...
Only, for eyes that all too wisely see
The sun at midday, and are blind therefore,
Only the Dark—where, lambent to the core,
Gyre the great stars' deepening galaxy! ...
Only of ignorance the ancient wrong;
Only of life the viewless counterpart;
Only of truth the secret undivined;
Only—new ranges for the feet of song,
New loves of the inextinguishable heart,
New powers of the imperishable mind! ...”
155

FAITH

I

There's a star overseas like a dew-drop new-hung on a bud that uncloses;
There's a fire in the turrets of heaven; there's a flush on the breast of the sea;
And the gates of the sun-rise are filled with a flame as of myriad roses,
That kindles ineffable vistas, a world re-created for me.
There's a hill in its vestment of dew-fall that kneels like a priest to the altar;
Low bird-cries resound in the silence, frail tendrils reach forth to the light;
The fields flower-breasted are fragrant, and fresh the faint breezes that falter:—
Life's faith in the future is perfect, life's dream of eternity bright! ...
If ours were the faith of the petals unfolding, the nest and its treasure,—
The faith all revealed and illumined, the faith that alone makes us free,—
156

What divine understanding were ours of the sun-light that flows without measure,
Of the silver of moon-light that rings down the resonant floor of the sea! ...
What divine understanding for life; for the world how majestic a meaning;
What truths by the way-side; in martyrdom, poverty, pain, what delight;
What poems in the midnight; what visions revealed that the darkness was screening,
As like fire-tinged incense the dawn-mists flush deep round the knees of the night! ...
O, beware! for the safety we cherish is false:—we are blind! we are soothless!—
Have we learned how the fields are made fruitful? Are we aimed to life's ultimate goal?—
O for faith to accept for our lives not an ecstasy less, not a truth less,
Than the world and the senses afford us, than are sphered in the scope of the soul! ...
157

II

To-day the Lord sleeps in the House of Life ...
Round him the dark is dumb, deserted, deep;
And all the haste we make, the feast we keep,
The law we serve with cross and cord and knife,
The Gods we supplicate, the tears we weep,
The crowns we win as victors in the strife,
The forms and fears with which our days are rife,
Like vague, fantastic dreams perturb his sleep ...
He sleeps and dreams to-day and yesterday.—
When shall he wake, and in his eyes the breath
Of day-break burn with truth's eternal beams?
When shall he wake? ... We ask in wild dismay!—
Haste! lest he sleep, as now he sleeps and dreams,
Dreamless to-morrow in the House of Death! ...
158

III

Yet, as the truth's new testament contrives,
Daily within the meditative mind,
Orbits of light where thought before was blind,
And where was doubt supreme imperatives;—
So, in the high adventure of our lives,
As we are real, receptive, unresigned,
Seeking the Lord, we shall not fail to find:
Till strength by strength his regency revives ...
Then shall his will and work alone be done
In all we do; his voice alone resound
In all we say; and he alone confound—
Imperishable when all else perisheth!—
With eyes of daring and dominion,
The void, vast vision of the Sphinx of Death! ...
159

IV

Hourly to find perfection in all things,
And in ourselves perfection;—day by day,
Greatly adventured on the endless way,
To realize truth's inspired imaginings;—
To beat up the wide skies of thought on wings
Radiant with sunrise;—to depart away
Into the future with the great grave gay
Passionate heart of life that loves and sings;—
This is the soul's desire!—the secret aim
Of life's dim aspiration, from the sod
Thro' countless forms, thro' beast and man and God!—
This is the mind's pure ecstasy; and this
Is love, which kindles to a single flame
Life's immemorial validities!
160

THE CITY

I

Wherever man has loved and lived,
Has starved his soul or slaked his lust,
Has trusted and betrayed his trust,
Has wept, rejoiced, blasphemed, believed;
Wherever in the senseless dust
His wearied, hasty feet have trod;
Wherever he has dreamed of God
And dared believe that Time was just;
Wherever, heedless to discern
And careless of the soul's concern,
Man's avid heart has coveted
The little of his daily need,—
Thrones, powers, dominions, riches, bread;—
While, overgrown with tare and weed,
The fruit of Truth's eternal seed
Was left to rot unharvested;
Wherever man has heard, instead
Of thought's serene, grave, inward voice,
The world's persuasion, loud and sweet,
And made with all the world his choice
To traffic in the common street,
To live as all men must who live
For what reward the world can give,
161

To wander aimless here and there
On life's familiar thoroughfare
Where the Innumerable pass,
Whose days are waste as withered grass,
In fear and hope, in storm and stress,
From nothingness to nothingness;
Wherever man has been steadfast
And, patient as the truth must be,
Fulfilled his human works and days,
Or, blind with secret ecstasy,
Has fled from death, and fled in vain,
By vagrant, dark, eccentric ways
Which led no-whither first and last;
Wherever man, diseased, insane,
Delirious, drunk in heart or brain,
Has ravened like a raging beast,
Has strayed or stayed, has been, has ceased,
Inglorious and irresolute;
Wherever man was mild and mute,
Was loud and fierce, was sane and strong;
Wherever man has blown life's lute
And phrased the harmony of things,
Or touched the harp of love to song
And learned to use the voice that sings;
Wherever, in whatever days,
Majestic, mighty, mad or mean,
Man's human being once has been
Or being once has ceased to be;—
162

There, interlocked inseparably,
Diverse yet single near and far,
There is the City!—where the ways
And byways of the City are.

II

There is the City!—vast, sublime,
Serene, discordant, sordid, small,—
Hither and hence in space and time
The self-same City, all in all,
Is here and there, is first and last!
There where the twilights fail and fall;
There in the wide and wasted Past
When Time was vacant, vague and vast;
There where the light of truth is least,
Where life, transcendent of the beast,
Was first in man's resemblance cast;
There where in jungle, waste and fen,
Coeval with the birth of man,
The byways and the ways began,
There is the City—there and then!
And there and thence the City is:
Where near and far the countless ways
Record in each evolving phase
Man's endless metamorphosis;
Thence from the sunless depths below,
Hither by ways we know not of
Of life necessity and love,
163

The long, hard, human high-ways come;
And whence they come and where they go,—
There at the dark circumference,
There is the City, there and thence;—
Here where we live and make our home,
Here is the City!—here and now:
Here where the dull and aimless plow
Of gross desire and bitter need
Furrows the barren fields where chance
Has sown the seed of circumstance
Whereof the fruit is Destiny;
Here where the thrifty soil that teems
With good grain waste and many a weed
Starves at its root the Sacred Tree
Of Knowledge; here where Love dies young,
Where Truth's stern secrets find no tongue,
Where the mind's weakness and the heart's despair
Brim the deep bowl of human ignorance
With the mandragora of dreams;
Here in the loud, long thoroughfare
Made straight and smooth by countless feet;
Here in the mean, familiar street
Where, in the Spirit's jeopardy,
Men wake and sleep and take no care
Of why or whither, whence or where:—
Here is the City!—here are we! ...
Here is the City—Here! ... But there,
There where the brave are gone before,
164

There where the lamps of Truth and Love
Shine steadfast at the Secret Door,
Is not the City!—there above,
And there beyond and forward there;
There where the high-ways hasten hence;
There, up the steep and star-lit stair,
Where they are gone, the Gods we did not know!
Have we not seen them, heard them go
In virtue and beneficence,
The Bearers of the Sacred Flame?
Who thro' the long, primeval twilights came,
And thro' these purlieus where we are,
Led by a faith, a song, a star,
Passed on to where the summits kindle, where
The living light grows large and lovelier,
And where the eye long used to vigil may
Discern, ineffable and far away,
Tranquil as Truth's transcendent love,
Spacious and excellently fair,
Rise, pure as diamond,
Poised in the sun-swept silence far beyond
And far above,
Where at its heart the City is,
The still, clear marbles of the calm Acropolis!

III

There is the City!—thither let us go!
We have too long lived out our times in vain!
165

Let us depart! What profit shall we gain
If, when the labour of all our days is done,
Ourselves are vanquished and the world is won?
Let us depart! for well we know
Life wills us forward to a better place
Than this cramped room of weakness and disgrace,
And forward all the song-voiced trumpets blow
Their challenge to the rising sun!
Forward the thoroughfares of thought go hence
From excellence to excellence,
And have we will to walk thereon,
Hence, as they lead us, we may go!
Hence as they lead us, They are gone,
Those hardy exiles who with eager feet
Fare forward up the shining street;
And as They neither rest nor sleep
But Truth's eternal vigil keep
In strength and silence—so must we!
For there, and always forward there,
There is the City, where the soul
Is free in Truth's divine control
And native to the lucent air!
Let us depart!—tho' there above
It well may be the ways are steep
The great lights far, the darkness deep,
The Soul has no concern thereof,—
Whose longing is all thither and all hence,
Whose will is unappeased to make its home
166

Not in these purlieus of the City where
The sunless hovels of man's indigence
Crowd meanly on the sordid thoroughfare,
But there where thought's immeasurable dome
Kindles and clears and is fulfilled with light!
For there by day the lordly sun
Of all the heart's surpassing love
Moves in his azure calm immensities;
For there by night
The stars of Truth are one by one,
Like silver syllables of song,
Uttered in thought's tense taciturnities,
And forward, all the large night long,
In stately constellations move;
For there the Parapets and Palaces,
Resplendent in their ordered distances,—
The lofty Towers, the shining Dome
Of the Spirit's Fatherhouse, of Home,
Rise radiant in the lucent, free,
Fabulous spaces of eternity;
And on the ramparts, all day long,
Clear-eyed and calm and vigilant,
The mind's supreme tranquillities
Brood on the soul's infinities
Till all we are and all that is
Is sacred and significant;—
And there and then at last we may stand up and sing,
Rise up with the rose-coloured dawn on either wing,
167

And with a voice exceeding sweet and strong
Phrase in the heart's antiphonies of song
The soul's clear chaunt of challenge and reprieve,—
And perfectly, at last, and wisely live!
For, builded solely from its base for this,
There, perfect at the core, man's City is!
168

LOWER NEW YORK

BEFORE DAWN

Time has no spectacle more stern and strange;
Life has no sleep so dense as that which lies
On walls and windows blank as sightless eyes,
On court and prison, warehouse and exchange.
Earth has no silence such as fills the range
Of streets left bare beneath the haughty skies:—
Of unremembered human miseries
Churned without purpose in the trough of change.
For here where day by day the tide-race rolls
Of sordid greed and passions mean and blind,
Here is a vast necropolis of souls!
And life that waits as with suspended breath,
Weary and still, here seems more dead than death,
Aimless and empty as an idiot's mind.

AT DAWN

Here is the dawn a hopeless thing to see:
Sordid and pale as is the face of one
Who sinks exhausted in oblivion
After a night of deep debauchery.
Here, as the light reveals relentlessly
All that the soul has lost and greed has won,
169

Scarce we believe that somewhere now the sun
Dawns overseas in stainless majesty.
Yet the day comes!—ghastly and harsh and thin
Down the cold street; and now, from far away,
We hear a vast and sullen rumour run,
As of the tides of ocean turning in. ...
And know, for yet another human day,
The world's dull, dreadful labour is begun!
170

[We have loathed him, we have loved him, we have lived for him and died for him]

I

We have loathed him, we have loved him, we have lived for him and died for him;
We have agonized and wearied in the travail of his birth;
We have lured him and procured him, we have sinned for him and lied for him,
And known what he was worth to us—and known what he was worth!
We have never dared to trust him, never dared to tell the truth to him:
We have done the work and waited; we have borne the pain and smiled;
We have been despair and evil, virtue, aspiration, youth to him;
We have cheated him and charmed him, for we knew he was a child!
We were never what he thought us, never what he said we seemed to him;
And of course we never told him, and of course we never cared:
We have been the thing he loved, the strength he lacked, the dreams he dreamed to him,
171

And for what his love conceived us he has worked and sung and dared.
And our hearts have bled and broken, and our flesh—God knows!—has burned for him:
In despair and pain and passion we have loved him—as we must!
For his children and his labour we have schemed for him and yearned for him,
Believed his boast and soothed his tears, assuaged and shared his lust.
We have loved him without reason, without stint, without surcease of him;
We have feared his wrath and weakness, feared his madness, feared his fears;
We have tamed him and caressed him, and our lives have had no peace of him:
For his Gods and greeds and glories cost our blood and sweat and tears! ...
He has made us to his pleasure: we have had the senseless worst of him;
We have made him to our purpose, then and now and still the same!
And as wife and slave and mistress, now adored and now accursed of him,
172

We have bought, seduced, compelled him to our sacred single aim.
Yes, we triumph! He is ours!—But ours, we know, is not the whole of him!
Weak and stupid, vain or vicious, we possess, who care and can;
But we learn, when he escapes in truth and spirit all control of him,
That while we are always woman, he is less—and more than man! ...
173

SUN, MOON AND STARS

I
THE SUN

Source, strength and splendour of the dawn and day;
Lord of the noon and of the afternoon;
Soul of the sunset; master of the moon;—
We are thy creatures! ... who shall pass away
From grief and joy, from labour and love and play,—
The will that strives, the hopes that weary and swoon:—
For these are life and life shall leave us soon—
Thy life incarnate in our mortal clay.
Yet is it conscious of some nobler end,
In us transfigured, than to live and die
Blind and enslaved: in ways unknown to thee,
In free communion with a lover or friend,
In thought's perfection, we exemplify
What more than life thy life has come to be!
174

II
THE MOON

Moon of our nights of youth, grave ardent gold
Majestic mistress of the yearning sea;
Moon of our young love's blinding ecstasy;
Moon of mused secrets that no tongue has told;—
Moon of our first fine midnights, pure and cold, ...
When, with the stir of God's nativity
Within us, we discerned the Mystery
And guessed what death might give and life withhold!
Moon of impassioned vigil in the high
Spacious tranquillities of earth and sky,
As, then, we saw thy light in darkness move
Like guidance on the immeasurable seas,
So, now, we see the full-orbed moon of love
Move on the soul's more vast immensities! ...
175

III
THE STARS

They saw the self-same stars we see to-night
At Ur, Nippur, Mosul and Ispahan,
And where the Tigris and Euphrates ran,
And where Bagdad displayed the Caliph's might.
The Jew, the swart Arabian robed in white,
The Kurd, the camel and the caravan
Passed on their way from Cairo to Sistan,
Led thro' the trackless deserts by their light.
They saw the self-same stars as we:—perchance
They felt as we the self-same rapt surmise
Of life and death! ... until they saw as we,—
Thrilled with the soul's supreme significance,—
Strange constellations dawn within their eyes,
Wrought on the shadow of eternity! ...
176

ILION

I

They turned into the day-break, and the light
Lay level in their eyes. They held the free
Fortunate wind across the blue bland sea:
Of all their lives the flame burned wild and bright.
Clear as the eyes of Helen shone by night
The lordly stars, which spelled their destiny;
The sun's perennial splendour seemed to be
Gold as the hair of Helen in their sight.
But Agamemnon, saviour of the fleet,
Only forever saw, with haunted eyes,
Iphigeneia bleeding at his feet;
And, in prophetic rapture, felt, too late,
Fierce as the eyes of Clytemnestra's hate,
Burst from his palsied tongue death's strangling cries! ...

II

Crying, she woke, with fate's relentless hand
Cold at her heart; and, breathless with despair,
She saw the great gaunt galleys, and the flare
Of camp-fires kindling on the Trojan strand.
And Menelaus!—she beheld him stand
177

With ravaged eyes that could not cease to stare. ...
She heard, borne up the windy Ilian air,
The lyric language of the Fatherland.
Then, with a roar as when the storm-wind blows,
The innumerable alien city rose,
And thronged the ramparts,—where, amid the gloom,
The inviolate victim of God's thwarted lust,
Cassandra, robed in mourning, crowned with dust,
Wailed in deaf ears the inexorable doom!

III

He saw Scamander crawl in fire and blood,
Stagnant with slain, beneath the burning wall.
Seaward he drove! But still, tho' like a pall,
Darkly, where once the rumouring city stood,
He felt Death's immemorial silence brood;
Shrill in his blood-sick heart he heard, withal,
The shriek of Hecuba, the frenzied call
Of Hector's Bride, bereft of motherhood!
And still of Helen his only visions were!
Her eyes of wonder, and her endless hair,
Lightening like sunrise! ... still he felt, for her
His wrath had branded with a harlot's shame,
Leap in his heart the blind consuming flame
Of love imperishable and love's despair!
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